South Korea slams Japan's proposal to list slave labour locations as Unesco World Heritage Sites

South Korea has slammed the Japanese government's proposal to register industrial facilities as a Unesco World Heritage Site because of their association with Korean slave labourers during the second world war, South Korean media reported this week.

Tokyo plans to recommend 28 places to be collectively designated as a World Heritage Site in 2015, said Chosun newspaper, South Korea’s biggest daily.

Among the sites to be recommended to the UN agency are a shipyard in Nagasaki, a defunct coal mine in Hashima, a steel mill in Fukuoka and other facilities that are still in use.

During the war, approximately 4,700 Koreans were forced to work at the Nagasaki shipyard to build warships and some 800 others worked at the Hashima mine, according to the South Korean media reports.

The sites, mostly located in Japan’s southwestern island of Kyushu, are worthy of inclusion on the Unesco list because they played a pivotal role in the country’s industrialisation during the Meiji era from 1868 to 1912, the Japanese newspaper Asahi explained.

Tokyo will reportedly submit its formal recommendation for the “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution” to Unesco on February 1, 2015.